A book arrived through the post yesterday: E.A.E. Reymond & J.W.B. Barns, Four Martyrdoms from the Pierpont Morgan Coptic Codices, Oxford (1973). This contains the martyrdom of St Colluthus, plus an English translation. I did try to order it by ILL, but something went wrong, and I gave up. Needless to say they have now actioned it, just as the book from Amazon arrived.
Looking at it made me realise that I just do not read many – or any – physical paper books any more. It’s all electronic. My novels are on kindle, and my reference texts in PDF. Anyway today I settled down to get to grips with it.
But it’s a funny old thing. There’s a long and rambling introduction, which needed the attention of an editor badly. It’s as if the authors just decided to talk around the subject, darting off here and there. It’s full of interest, but compared to modern introductions, organised by topic with headings, it is very frustrating. It really resists the reader. This is a black mark on Oxford University Press, who should have demanded better.
This is followed by the Coptic text for all four martyrdoms – which has NOT been typeset! Instead the pages are reproductions of hand-written sheets. It’s incredible that in 1973 the press issued a volume without typesetting. Oxford has been typesetting Coptic since the 18th century. So what on earth happened here?
This is followed by translations of the four texts. These are plainly designed as cribs. Mysteriously various parts of the translation are in italics. The introduction offers no clue. Fortunately a couple of these were in the first line. I wondered if these were words not in the original, as in the old KJV bible translation. But this was impossible. I looked at the tiny, handwritten Coptic, and then at the indexes – also handwritten! – and realised that these words in Italics were the Greek words like “martyrologion” embedded in the Coptic. A footnote would have helped.
I think a bit of user-friendly formatting may help with the readability of the translation, so I will try this.
The introduction does contain interesting material. For one thing, I learned that even Hippolyte Delahaye, the great Bollandist hagiographer of the early 20th century, thought that Coptic martyrdoms were pretty bad. I feel better now, after concluding the same about yesterday’s texts.
For another, I learn that the martyrdom of St Colluthus reads a lot like a Roman trial record, rather than a made-up hagiography. The prosecutor Arianus is a historical figure, attested elsewhere, with his genial, polished routine of getting prisoners to sacrifice to the gods. Arianus refers to one bishop who has done so, as a way to pressure the victim; and apparently a letter from a patriarch to that bishop exists, unpublished in 1973, bollocking him for doing so. This deserves investigation.
I wondered about the editor, E.A.E. Reymond (1923-1986). Apparently there is an entry for her in M. L. Bierbrier, “Who was who in Egyptology”, 5th edition (2019), p.391; but this is not accessible to me. A google search tells me that her name was Eva Anne Elisabeth Jelínková-Reymond, known as Eve, and professionally as E. A. E. Reymond. She was a Czech scholar of Demotic, and worked as a research assistant at CNRS up to 1957, then at Cambridge (1955-1960), then as a lecturer, then reader in Coptic at the University of Manchester from 1960 onwards, although curiously she published nothing on Coptic until 1973. Her publications are all technical. She must have had an interesting life somewhere. I had thought about creating a Wikipedia page for her – if the people who control the site would allow it – but I really do not have enough information.